Giving a new lease of life to old books, the Madras Literary Society will have 50 titles that the public can chose from, to adopt and help restore.
As a part of an initiative which began earlier this year, 20 books have been adopted and restored. Fifty additional titles have now been identified for restoration and will be on display at the library in a few weeks, and the public can come forward to sponsor and fund its restoration.
“We try to select the oldest books and single editions across genres and languages available here. Among the books we have already restored are those with the records of sport and military life in western India and cartoons during the British rule in India,” said Thiruppurasundari Sevvel, a volunteer at the Society, who is also involved in the book conservation initiative.
Recently, the Madras Literary Society library received two grants of Rs. 25,000 each from P.M. Belliappa, a retired civil servant, who handed over the grants to historian S. Muthiah.
The grants from Mr. Belliappa’s family trust and the Association of British Scholars will be used to restore more books.
One of the oldest libraries in the country, the Madras Literary Society, established in 1817, has over 55,000 books in many languages.
The library has seen a significant increase in membership from mid-2015.
“There are now more than 320 regular members who visit the library and take books,” said Rajith Nair, a volunteer, who is working towards helping conserve and restore a number of books.
Each page that has to be restored will be dusted and treated to de-acidify and fumigate it.
The pages will then be inserted into an archival sheath and bound together.
“In the future, if there is a more cost-effective way, the page simply needs to be taken out of the sheath and scanned, which is why we chose to do this instead of laminating the pages. The process is expensive and for each book, it costs a minimum of Rs. 5,000,” Mr. Nair. said.
To make the restoration process more effective, volunteers and members of the MLS said that they needed volunteers to help catalogue the books in the library.
“While we have a fair idea of what books are there, they need to be indexed and catalogued according to genre and language. With better cataloguing of books, we will be able to identify more books which need to be restored,” a volunteer said.
